Bottle Cap Tambourine Pedal

Whenever I play as an acoustic blues duo I always try to make as much racket as I can, in the spirit of Dr Isaiah Ross:

Lugging a hi-hat around is pretty much out of the question, so I naturally went for a quick and nasty solution.

First you’ll want to polish off as many bottles of beer as you need bottle caps. This one is entirely up to you and how much racket you want to kick up, I went with 2 stacks of 3 to keep the plywood to a size that could fit into a gig bag.

Punch a hole through the centre of each bottle cap with a nail and hammer, then screw it onto the plank using a wood screw with a shaft that’s mostly unthreaded, so that the bottle caps don’t get stuck on the threads and dampen your merrymaking.

Next, you’ll want to have something springy below so that it comes back up after you step on it. I cut a piece of foam and stuck it on the bottom in unglorious fashion with masking tape:

It mic’s up pretty well if you’re playing on a bigger stage:

Un-mic-ed it can be pretty loud too for a small pub/cafe gig, here it is in action:

In that video you can faintly hear some kick-drum-ish thing going on too, that’s another pedal for another installment.

And for the record, Heineken and Carlsberg are piss. They just happened to be the only ones I had on hand at that point.